Your mom and I spent Christmas on our own in the beautiful little coastal village of Mendocino. She had been there once before on an overnight trip with friends, but it was our first time there together, and it was a wonderful place to spend the holiday. It was cute, quaint, quiet, and relaxing... just what the doctor ordered after a busy December.
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| It'd been too long since your mom and I just took a long drive together for a weekend, but the sense of adventure was easy to find on a new route through Lake County on the way to the coast on Christmas Day. Our first pit stop to enjoy the sights was alongside the massive Clear Lake. |
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| We made it to the coast in time for sunset just outside of Fort Bragg on Glass Beach. The rocky northern California coast always offers a wonderful sight. |
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| It was quite cold and - as you can see - very windy! |
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| Glass Beach gets its name for being covered in tiny fragments of glass. The glass accumulated there back when this area was basically a dump for the nearby towns. Eventually the coast became protected and dumping stopped, but a lot of glass shards remained, now smoothly polished by decades of waves. |
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| It got dark and we headed into nearby Mendocino. Champagne was waiting for us in the room to help us warm up after the evening of the frigid beach. Your mom particularly enjoyed a soak in the enormous claw-foot tub. |
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| Breakfast the next morning awaited us after we hopped out of bed to explore the town early in the morning. |
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| This is the bed and breakfast where we stayed, MacCallum House, a place with an interesting history in the town. It turned out to be an exceptional place to stay, with a great room, cozy fireplaces in the lounges downstairs, and a wonderful Christmas dinner in their dining room. |
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| With the morning sun shining bright, it was still quite chilly but we braved the cold wind to get some views of the sleepy town the day after Christmas. It was quite still except for the surf below. |
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| I treated your mom to a massage and made my way back to the coast to snap some more pictures. |
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| Later we explored more of the nearby coastline and even spotted some Grey Whales in the distance! This picture doesn't exactly do the sighting justice, but we were excited since we hadn't expected such good luck and had never spotted whales together before. |
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| More coastal exploration... We always get such a thrill out of gallivanting around beaches and rocky coastlines. |
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| After exploring the beach, we explored more of the town, one full of cute boutique shops. This is the house from the long-running murder mystery series Murder She Wrote. |
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| We enjoyed a drink on a second-floor balcony as the sun set again. |
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| The next morning we took the long way home, soaking up more of the coastal sights along a stretch of the Highway 1 we hadn't travelled before. |
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| The lighthouse at Point Arena wasn't far, so, reminiscing about our lighthouse themed adventure from years ago, we set out to see it. When we got there, we were again thrilled to see some local wildlife. This time it was seals lounging in the sun and flopping around every time a wave would crash over them. |
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| Lighthouses along these rocky coastlines always have a particular pull on us, and it was a fitting way to say goodbye to the ocean for now. We made a long, winding trek back through the northern California woods, hitting up a brewery along the way (of course) before getting back home. It was quite a Merry Christmas :) |
